No need to wear yourself out looking for educational institutions that have honor codes. I’m a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. They have one. Most of my adult life I lived in Charlotte, NC. I know from personal experience that Charlotte Catholic High School has a very strict one (do you mock them, too, Z?). Just north of Charlotte is Davidson College, a Presbyterian school where I taught part-time. I know they have one. Princeton? Got one. Vanderbilt? Yup. Stanford? Uh-huh. Westpoint? Better believe it! (I’d better stop listing the schools having honor codes before my fingers cramp-up). I even feel certain that at some time in its past, America’s oldest Catholic university had an honor code, at least when it was founded by Archbishop John Carroll and run by the Jesuits. Unfortunately, it seems that Georgetown University lately has become more interested in trying to put its Catholic identity behind it, so I don’t know. And maybe I’m totally missing your point. Perhaps you think its OK to have an honor code - just don’t enforce it.
I don’t know how many BYU students comprised the sample of Mormons used in the study of how higher education affects religious commitment. The co-authors of the study are both professionally trained sociologists (Stan Albrecht, Ph.D. in sociology from Washington State University and Tim Heaton, Ph.D in sociology from Harvard), so I would assume their sample would be a statistically fair cross-section so as not to skew their results. Certainly a very many Mormons attend institutions of higher learning other than BYU. The paper’s title is “Secularization, Higher Education, and Religiosity, Latter-Day Saint Social Life, Social Research on the LDS Church and its Members” (Provo, Utah: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1998). At the time of its publication, Albrecht was on the faculty at the University of Florida and so wasn’t even residing in Utah.
Then here comes the dog pile from everybody else. Mormons don’t have any scholars, just spinmeisters (we put “scholars” in quotes relative to Mormons so as to be clear that they really don’t have any) . Bushman gets a pat on the head, but certainly he’s no real scholar or historian, which causes me to wonder the same thing as another Mormon “non-scholar” who asked “When, exactly, did Richard Bushman lose his credibility as a historian? Was it prior to his winning the Bancroft Prize? Did it occur while he held his endowed chair in American history at Columbia University? Was it after his retirement, during his stint as a research fellow at Princeton? Or has it occurred only recently, after Columbia University Press published a collection of his LDS-related essays entitled Believing History?”.
And just how is it, anyway, that all these dopey non-scholars have conned the smart guys at Oxford University Press, Yale University Press, Columbia University Press, Alfred Knopf, and so many other first-rate publishing houses into printing their tripe about Mormonism? To me, many of you are making precisely the point that Owen/Mosser argue in their paper to the Evangelical community.
Everybody lol’s - it’s all just too funny. But interestingly, nobody takes on the arguments of current LDS scholarship. I only see bald assertions that no such scholarship exists. A common legal disclaimer at the end of a paper is seen as proof that its content is bogus. Really? Maybe we need a thread on what a legal disclaimer is. And if you don’t know, wouldn’t you at least wonder why the very institute that publishes and distributes the work hasn’t pulled it? Or why the leaders of the church haven’t disavowed it?
I think that the greater “cognitive dissonance” that is attempting to be resoved here is that which comes about when the reality is faced that Mormons aren’t nearly the idiots many would like to portray them as being.
